The birth of war: an archaeological survey concludes that warfare, despite its malignant hold on modern life, has not always been part of the human condition

Thirty years ago all the anthropologists studying war would have fit into one small room. Granted--and guaranteed--that room would frequently erupt in heated debate, but few outside would notice or care. Tribal warfare? Exotic, maybe, but so what? Anthropologists see war as potentially lethal violence between two groups, no matter how small the groups or how few the casualties. But how much light could such a broad definition of conflict, or cases of precivilized human strife, shed on modern warfare, the struggles that have flared in Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Vietnam, Korea--and on and on?

How times have changed! The anthropological study of war has expanded and matured. Ideas from academic debates are finding their way into foreign policy journals and, yes, the mass media. The questions raised by anthropologists and the once-academic disputes within the discipline have become important public issues, to be debated by pundits and politicians.

To appreciate how much things have changed, consider how the understanding of one famous ethnographic case has been transformed: that of the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil. Following the publication of Napoleon A. Chagnon's study Yanomamo: The Fierce People, in 1968, the book began to appear frequently and prominently on lists of readings for college students in introductory anthropology--often the only anthropology they would ever learn. And what an object lesson! Engaged in endless wars over women, status, and revenge, the Yanomami were supposed to exemplify the natural human condition of eons past. Some people took Chagnon's work to imply that aggression is in our genes--disturbing news if true.

In 1974 the anthropologist Marvin Harris offered a different view. Yanomami warfare, Harris argued, was an adaptive response from a population stressed by limited food resources, specifically game animals. But detailed examination of Yanomami ecology failed to support Harris's hypothesis.

In 1995, in Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, I described how the Yanomami have been coping with European intrusions since the 1700s. As I read the evidence, Yanomami wars were tightly linked to changes in the European presence. Recent wars, including the ones described by Chagnon, seemed to have been fought over access to steel tools and other goods distributed by Westerners. Yet despite such basic disagreements within anthropology, the discussion of the Yanomami remained confined to academic circles.

Then came a media frenzy. In the fall of 2000, Patrick Tierney, a journalist, published Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The book essentially blamed Chagnon himself for instigating war. Now it was the anthropologists' turn to be fierce. Opponents and defenders of Chagnon exchanged bitter broadsides. Not a few anthropologists felt that the resident missionaries, for all their good intentions, were more at fault than any anthropologists. One outcome of the episode, though, is that no one paying attention to this controversy still claims that Yanomami wars can be understood without taking into account the tribe's highly disrupted historical circumstances.

What is more, studies that go far beyond the Yanomami are questioning the idea that war has always been part of the human condition. It looks as if, all around the world, what has been called primitive or indigenous warfare was generally transformed, frequently intensified, and sometimes precipitated by Western contact. A collection of historical studies that I edited in 1992 with Neil L. Whitehead, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, concludes that such changes often took place in farflung "tribal zones," even before literate observers arrived on the scene. Indigenous warfare recorded in recent centuries cannot be taken as typical of prehistoric tribal peoples (see War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare). We need archaeology to tell us about ancient war.

In 1996 the issue took a new turn with Lawrence H. Keeley's book War before Civilization. Keeley, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, compiled archaeological cases of some of the worst violence known, thereby creating the impression that these examples were typical, that humans have always made war. As he told the journal Science, "War is something like trade or exchange. It is something that all humans do." Here I must unequivocally disagree: in my view the global archaeological record contradicts the idea that war was always a feature of human existence; instead, the record shows that warfare is largely a development of the past 10,000 years.

In the new book Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (written with the writer Katherine E. Register), Steven A. LeBlanc, an archaeologist at Harvard University, confidently asserts that wherever good' archaeological evidence exists, there is "almost always" evidence of warfare, that "everyone had warfare in all time periods." LeBlanc has a theory for his sweeping conclusion. Contrary to a commonly held view, he argues, pre-state peoples were never "true conservationists." They degraded their resources, and as their numbers grew, they suffered food scarcity and were drawn into war. Basically, it's Malthus with ethnographic detail.